A feeble joke won’t help Trump

When President Richard M. Nixon defeated his Democratic challenger, liberal senator George McGovern, in a landslide victory in 1972, receiving almost 20 million more popular votes and winning the Electoral College vote 520-17, according to information from the website Biography.com, the commander-in-chief looked invincible.

Then a strange thing happened. Nixon’s reelection campaign organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (aptly nicknamed CREEP) became so obsessed by Democratic opposition that it resorted to political sabotage and covert espionage. It led to the Watergate scandal, Nixon’s impeachment and his subsequent resignation, according to Biography.com.

President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but not the Senate, which meant that he remained in office through both of his two terms, according to Biography.com. In December 1998, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice for his actions in the Monica Lewinsky affair. But in February 1999, following a five-week trial, the Senate voted to acquit the president on both articles of impeachment.

Now it’s President Donald Trump’s turn to test the waters of ignominy. Yet he hasn’t let a little thing like his possible removal from office stop him. Trump appeared to mock U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and her late husband, former congressman John Dingell, D-Mich., during a speech Wednesday in their home state, suggesting that the World War II veteran and former congressman was “looking up” from hell, according to The Washington Post News Service.

Trump told a rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, that Debbie Dingell had thanked him for providing “A-plus treatment” after her husband’s death in February, such as ordering that flags be flown at half-staff. Trump said she told him that her late husband was “looking down.”

“Maybe he’s looking up,” Trump said, drawing some jeers and groans. “Maybe, but let’s assume he’s looking down.”

Telling a joke so feeble you can hear it land at his feet isn’t an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor — except to the shocked Dingell family, who clearly expected more from Trump. But why should they? And why should anyone else? Here he is at yet another solemn occasion cracking a tasteless joke for his best audience — himself.

Trump should educate himself in the ways of the Constitution and what the next six weeks hold for him as his impeachment trial approaches instead of making sport of a former congressman — a Democrat, we ought to note — who was 1,000 times the hero Trump is. Nixon saw “White House enemies” and Clinton testily referred to Monica Lewinsky as “that woman.” Be careful Mr. President, someone might be “looking up” at you right now.